A little more than a minute into “Angry”—the first song and first single from the first album of Rolling Stones originals in 18 years—Keith Richards summons a series of descending notes that sounds like an elusive, open-tuned riff he wrote at Villa Nellcote in 1971, one that turned an embryonic number called “Good Time Women” into “Tumbling Dice.” At the start of another new Stones song, “Driving Me Too Hard,” that little lick recurs. Are these intentional references? Or unconscious callbacks, the products of a recording career so extended that snatches of some songs are bound to sound like snatches of others? To finish an album plagued by previous false starts, the Stones worked at a pace that discouraged such questions. “Is this song like another one I’ve done? You can figure that out later,” Mick Jagger told The New York Times about the band’s approach in the studio. “Let’s keep moving.”
The band has done so, somehow, for more than 60 years, as certain as the deaths and taxes that haven’t imposed a stopping point. Hackney Diamonds, which arrives right after the diamond anniversary of the Stones’ inaugural release, has received the standard “best since Some Girls or Tattoo You” overhype afforded to a lot of late-period Stones albums, but it deserves the praise more than some of the others. That’s because, by design, it mostly threads the needle of sounding semi-contemporary without being embarrassingly thirsty to seem au courant; retro without reeking of a tribute-band retread. The echoes of old tracks from assorted Stones eras read less like exercises in self-pastiche than natural outgrowths of their distinctive styles; these aren’t trademark infringements, but trademark renewals. And the moments that transport listeners to specific parts of their past—like those “Tumbling Dice” do-overs or Ronnie Wood’s séance for Brian Jones’s “No Expectations” slide guitar on a country track called “Dreamy Skies”—are rare enough to be welcome when they arrive. If you’re listening to the Stones in 2023, it’s probably because you’re hoping they’ll still sound like the Stones. Their past is part of our past, too.
There’s one respect in which the Stones sound most impressively like their old selves (or, perhaps, their young selves, even though they’re old): Jagger’s voice. He still snarls and shouts, does drawls and falsettos, and molds and stretches words in that inimitable—OK, pretty imitable, actually—Mick manner. “Listen to his vocals, man—there’s no difference between 18 and 80,” 33-year-old Hackney Diamonds producer Andrew Watt told The Guardian.
That’s not quite true: Suggesting Jagger hasn’t changed at all underrates and overrates him at the same time. I haven’t heard an 18-year-old Jagger—those demos were auctioned off—but he’s a far superior singer at 80 than he was at 19. Which isn’t to say his voice sounds the same as it did during the Stones’ prime. “His voice has changed somewhat and has a different texture,” Lenny Kravitz said 15 years ago (though he also added, “but it’s stronger now”). There’s a little less smooth sultriness and maybe more of a nasal tone. There’s also, it seems, a greater tendency toward over-enunciation and, live at least, a more staccato quality at times (though those seem more like stylistic choices than reflections of vocal quality). A Stones fan could almost certainly distinguish the old Jagger from the young Jagger in a blind audition, but it would be a bigger challenge than it would with almost any other rock vocalist of similar vintage (not that there are that many rock vocalists of similar vintage). His instrument is a time machine.
There are, of course, a lot of ways in which Jagger defies the look and lifestyle of a typical 80-year-old man—or even, for that matter, a typical 80-year-old touring and recording rock star. He has a full head of hair that’s suspiciously close to its original color. (Even Paul McCartney, who plays a frantic fuzz-box bass on the Hackney Diamonds track “Bite My Head Off,” has, however belatedly, let his head go a graceful gray after decades of dye jobs.) He has a girlfriend and a mini-Mick son with a combined age that is barely half of his own. Although he had a heart valve replaced in 2019, he’s still restless and sinuous on stage and could probably still squeeze into some of the skintight jumpsuits from his 50-years-ago glam phase.
But where recording is concerned, his voice matters most. Sure, Mick may look a little like a Lord of the Rings character (Jann Wenner’s words, not mine). But his voice—which he wanted to use to portray a Lord of the Rings character 45 years ago—is powerful and almost pristine. And lest you think some studio trickery is responsible for its preternatural preservation—a touch of Auto-Tune, perhaps?—well, watch this:
As my former colleague Lindsay Zoladz wrote after attending that album release show, “They sounded—miraculously—just like the Rolling Stones.” Mick, maybe, most miraculously of all, considering his singing assignment. I mean, that man was born in 1943. He’s too old to be a boomer! Sir Mick is a member of the Silent Generation! (Ironically.)
I was born long enough after that to be the same age as Jagger’s girlfriend, but musically, there’s more than a bit of boomer in me. (As evidence, I offer the number of times I’ve persuaded someone to let me write about McCartney.) Listening to a lot of music made before you were born leads to two consequences. First, a sort of stolen nostalgia sets in. It’s not as if hearing that “No Expectations”–esque slide work reminded me of when I was spinning Beggars Banquet on vinyl in late ’68. That album was old as hell when I heard it for the first time. Yet I feel a wistful fondness for it—and a jolt of recognition at those soundalike licks—that I imagine may not be too different from what someone might feel if they’d encountered it at the same formative musical age a few decades earlier.
The second thing that happens when you listen to records decades after they were laid down—or scrimp and save to see their creators revisit them down the line—is you become a kind of connoisseur of the musical aging curve. When you “discover” a discography after its authors are already considered dinosaurs, you can assess the sweep of their whole history and compare past to present, a perspective that’s lacking when you watch a career with great interest from the start. For me—and, at this point, probably for most Rolling Stones fans—the Stones have always been two bands: the young one of legend and the wizened one of today. In their case, the gulf between the two units is vast in terms of the quantity and quality of new material—notwithstanding Hackney Diamonds’ more-than-decent set of songs—but mercifully modest when it comes to the capacity to play the hits fairly faithfully.
That’s not to say it can’t be worthwhile to see songs performed slower and lower than you’re used to (or even in an unrecognizable form). But when you develop an attachment to a band based on its peak period, you feel continued concern and affection for the band. Even if the band has lost some of the original lineup and mostly morphed into a legacy act touring on oldies, you still want those oldies to sound up to snuff. It’s tough not to weigh each new song or new performance of a concert staple against your awareness of how the band—and the singer—used to sound, the way one might worriedly watch out for signs of decline in an older relative whom you hope lives forever.
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Here’s what I’ve learned from figuratively taking the pulses of some of my favorite rockers as they’ve entered their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Many musicians only improve at playing their instruments as they age (at least until arthritis sets in). Many songwriters’ skills stay intact long after they’ve lost their grasp on the zeitgeist. But the vocal cords rarely lie: “Age is not usually kind to voice,” Roger Daltrey said in 2018. With fairly few exceptions, the evolution (or devolution) of the lead singer’s sound is as good a guide to a group’s age as the number of rings in a trunk is to a tree’s.
Once you’ve adopted this well-intentioned but almost morbid way of marking the passage of time, you start thinking in terms of trajectories, inflection points, and before-and-after sonic snapshots. You probably know, for instance, about the 1987 vocal-cord surgery that permanently altered the voice of another Hackney Diamonds guest star, Elton John. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the youngest guest star on the album by a few decades, Lady Gaga, is the only one who sings.) You have, perhaps, read a thousands-of-words-long attempt to pinpoint precisely when and why Robert Plant stopped consistently hitting (or trying to hit) certain high notes. (Though he hardly sounds bad.) You’ve almost certainly tracked, with some dismay, the degradation of McCartney’s once-stunning voice, which was thrown into stark relief by the juxtaposition of McCartney III album-closer “Winter Bird/When Winter Comes”—for which he recorded the vocals in 1992—and the rest of that record, committed to tape in 2020.
Now, there’s nothing inherently better or worse about the way a voice sounds at one age or another. Some singers like their late-career rumble, and some fans concur, if they can let go of the desire to be taken back to their youths by a singer who still sounds as if they’re holding on to theirs. “I just have more resonance in my voice, and I’m much happier with that,” John said in 2004 about the procedure that stole some of his upper register. “Halfway through my career, I got a voice change, thanks a lot! And I’ve learned to breathe properly, I’ve watched other people singing, I’ve become a much better singer. I’ve become a singer that plays the piano instead of a piano player that sings.”
Age taketh away, but it also gave to Peter Gabriel, who put it this way in 2011: “I think my voice has probably dropped a tone [over the years], and most of the songs that have high notes, I’ve had to lower a tone for the set. On the other hand, you get given some notes down the bottom end. You only have to look at people like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, or Leonard Cohen, who have done more with their old voice than they were able to do with their youthful voice.”
I’m not sure Jagger himself could have comfortably hit the lowest notes in his 2022 Slow Horses theme song in his “Wild Horses” heyday. But Mick seems mostly immune to time-related alterations, let alone ravages. Time waits for no one, but it’s waiting at least a little while for him. He’s the ultimate Old Guy Who’s Still Got It. The day after the release of Blue & Lonesome, the Stones’ 2016 blues covers album, a user on audio engineer Steve Hoffman’s music forum, an audiophile hot spot, started a thread titled: “Is Mick Jagger the only singer out there who still sounds exactly like when he was young?” That post prompted 17 pages of discussion, in which plenty of respondents quibbled over the premise. But with almost anyone else, there wouldn’t have been a debate. (Other popular nominees: Colin Blunstone, Al Jardine, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Paul Rodgers, and the late David Crosby.)
So how has Jagger largely flouted the natural, typical progression in singers of a certain age? Well, he’s probably lucked out to some extent, but he’s also taken steps—many, many steps—to ensure he can keep howling with something approaching his previous strength. He’s believed to have stopped smoking in the late ’70s. (Richards quit much more recently, which seems to have helped his Hackney Diamonds vocal turn; with a little less phlegm, he also sounds almost the same as he used to, though he’s really in the Ringo Starr camp of singers who never had that far to fall.*) He’s a nutrition and fitness fanatic. And he’s a diligent vocal exerciser who started working with a vocal coach and doing warm-ups in the early 2000s. In 2008, Kravitz recalled vacationing with Jagger in the Bahamas during a two-week break in a Stones tour. Every evening, Jagger danced and sang to an instrumental sound-check tape of the rest of the Stones. He had to keep moving, or he might have gathered moss.
*Reports that Ringo had played on Hackney Diamonds were apparently inaccurate, but it’s hard not to notice that the Stones are down a fully inducted drummer and bassist. Imagine how much money a Jagger-Richards-Wood-McCartney-Starr Stones-Beatles hybrid band could command in concert. Who says no to the Bones, the short-term supergroup successor to the Dirty Mac? (Probably everyone.)
The other reason Stones fans never need to lament missing out on what a younger Mick could have done with a late-stage Stones song is that, in some respects, he may have had less to lose to age than some other famous frontmen and solo singers. (And not just because he always emulated old bluesmen.) A few years ago, Billy Joel recounted, “There was a moment back in, oh, [the ’90s] when I said goodbye to that high note in ‘An Innocent Man.’ It was there, but I could tell that was probably the last time I’d hit it, so it was like, ‘See ya. That’s it for Billy’s high note.’ It happens to all of us. That’s just reality.”
In truth, Joel still strives to hit that high note, though he prefaces assaults on the summit with a well-practiced, self-effacing disclaimer that elicits some yuks and the audience’s sympathy. But Joel, John, Plant, and others hit more high notes to begin with than Jagger ever did, falsetto aside. Even in his prime, Jagger didn’t impress people from a technical perspective: His vocal range and intonation weren’t so spectacular. “A great band, but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer,” a letter from Decca Records supposedly said, after the Stones submitted an early demo. Mick himself professed to have a low opinion of his vocal skills. In 1969, he said, “I don’t really like singing very much. I’m not really a good enough singer to really enjoy it. … If I keep on playing the guitar, I can get better, where I can’t improve much as a singer.”
He may not have gotten much better, but he certainly hasn’t gotten much worse. His attitude, his energy, his ability to embody characters and cross genres—all the ways in which he always was off the charts (and now finds himself back on them) are more resistant to age than the vagaries of vocal cords, cartilage, and muscles in the larynx.
Actuarial math would still suggest that this could be the last time the Stones put out an album, though Jagger and Richards say there’s more music on the way. If and when it arrives, I don’t doubt that Mick, a marvel among his shrinking peer group, still won’t sound his age. “I’m too young for dying,” Jagger sings on “Depending on You.” Yet he knows that’s not true: As he recently told The Guardian, “There’s a lot of people around your age, they’re dying all the time. I don’t have any friends older than me, only one.” So maybe this sentiment, from “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” is more apt: “Let us sing, let us shout / Let us all stand up proud / Let the old still believe that they’re young.” That much Mick accomplishes whenever he has the mic.
